Empathy's Price
by OliveBranchStories
Summary: The scene where Aang enters the Avatar State in 'The Desert' after the sandbenders stole Appa, told from Toph's perspective. One shot. "Aang was a flicker of light and the Avatar State was the eclipse, and Toph was skewered by the certainly that from this there could be no returning."


Hello lads and lasses,

I have made an update. How shocking. It's been a while; aggravatingly I have two other stories almost finished, the beginnings of something that may or may not grow into a thing, and an actual thing that I am really, really liking that I am persistently working on whenever I get the time (only on the ipad though. Don't know why, but I only write that story on the notepad section of the ipad.)

Just before the season 3 finale at the end of August I got into the tv show Legend of Korra. I then of course saw the finale and there were no more episodes to watch, so after rewatching it a few times I started on Avatar: The Last Airbender. I gotta say, I forgot how amazing this show was. It is bafflingly good, definitely one of the best shows on tv despite being aimed at kids. The world is so complete, the plot so coherent, characters interesting and developing and the MORALS. I love a story that grapples tangled ethical issues, and this show did not shy from any battles. Love it.

I was inspired to write this particular story because it really does interest me how other characters see Aang (also, Korra) in regards to the Avatar State. It is so Other and would be so easy to form a divide between them. As normal as they treat Aang and Korra and as close as friends they are, there would be _something _there. The Avatar State is so powerful and alien it would be impossible that it did not break into their friendship and change it somehow.

Also, it was very interesting to draw from the perspective of a blind character. It made me realize how many visual terms make it into our day to day language as I had to alter them to be more appropriate for how Toph would think. (Example: I almost wrote "how Toph would see the world," but that would not be correct.)

Anyway, I hope you are all well and enjoy this story.

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><p><strong>Empathy's Price.<strong>

Toph was a fighter through and through, from her strong hands to her listening feet, but even she didn't care for this kind of battle. The hot rock beneath her vibrated with information; Katara to her right and Sokka on Katara's far side, the shifting waves of sand against it and buzzing tunnels deep within, and none of it was of any use to her. The angry sound of dozens of Buzzard-wasp wings came from the sky all around them as one giant, cacophonous noise and Toph couldn't pin a single creature down. With her blindness on top of Aang leaving them to save Momo, Katara either being almost or completely out of water and Sokka being both a non-bender and still recovering from hallucinating on all day on cactus juice, they were a bunch of sitting Turtle-ducks.

Holding up her hands clenched and ready Toph waited impatiently for Katara to grab her shoulders, force her around and yell "THERE!" If they were lucky this would be followed by the crunch of rock on bony carapace and a sand-muffled thud. It was too slow a process and nowhere near enough to stop them from being torn to pieces but Toph would be damned if she wasn't going to go down throwing boulders.

Suddenly there came a huge rushing noise and a hot wind ripped across the rock. Toph covered her face with her arm as a thousand grains of sand tore bit her arms, her legs, and the exposed skin of her neck. Something enormous moved in front of them, hissing and rushing into the sky, sounding like some sort of giant backward landslide. There were shrill craws of alarm from the Buzzard-wasps and then abruptly the noise of their wings flying off, driven away.

They were retreating from the landslide, but that had been no natural landslide. Toph was smart and she knew what had happened before the great crashing-thump of a mass of sand falling onto another mass of sand.

Sandbenders. It had to be sandbenders.

Something inside Toph twisted and hardened. A library sunk before her and Appa was dragged away.

The desert stilled and slowly she lowered her arm. Before she could ask Katara and Sokka anything there was another noise and an unnatural gust of air, but these were very familiar. A quiet rush of wind over cloth and a decisive sort of snap, then the sound of Aang's feet on the ground. Toph couldn't identify the noise of his unique footfalls on the sand or the feel of them from where she was on the rock, but she would know that glider anywhere. Swooping over their heads Momo landed on Sokka's shoulder, meekly and unnaturally silent.

As soon as Aang returned Katara started scrambling down off the rock and onto the sand. With a surge of irritation and regret Toph followed Katara onto the murky grounds, stepping into darkness. The desert made her feel actually blind but whilst she hated it she did not hesitate. There were sandbenders out there, an unknown amount an unknown distance away, with unknown intentions in their heads, and Aang was standing before them.

Aang who, since losing Appa, had become an unfamiliar person wearing his name.

They were a team, Katara, Sokka, Aang and Toph, so them walking forward to stand next to Aang wasn't something they needed to discuss. Whatever these sandbenders wanted they'd face together.

For a moment the two groups evaluated each other from a mistrustful distance.

"What are you doing in our land with a sandbenders' sailer?" A sandpaper voice asked; male and old. "From the looks of it you stole it from the Hami tribe."

Katara responded, the self-appointed representative of their group.

"We found the sailer abandoned in the desert. We're travelling with the Avatar. Our bison was stolen and we have to get to Ba Sing Sae."

It had only been when they had found the great rock and Toph had felt whole again that she had realised just how much Katara had done for them over the past few hours. They'd lost Appa and were stranded in the desert, Toph couldn't see and thing, Aang had flown away and both Sokka and Momo had been off their heads courtesy of the native vegetation. In the past their little gang had faced down opportunistic earthbenders, murderous firebenders and Princess Azula, who was worse than the first two combined, and they'd come through it no worse for wear. But give them hopelessness, and give it to them in the middle of a desert, and they were in the sort of trouble that had a body count. The rest of the group had been just about ready to pack it in but Katara had refused to give up. She'd held them together through the power of obstinacy and sheer force of will.

Toph supposed she should say something vaguely appreciative about that; if they did end up making it out of there alive, of course.

In response to Katara a young male sandbender snapped, "You dare accuse our people of theft while you ride in on a stolen sandsailer!"

Toph's sightless eyes narrowed. The man's voice was ringing all sort of bells but she wasn't quite sure-

"Quiet Gashwin. No one accused our people of anything. If what they say is true we must give them hospitality," the old man said quellingly.

The younger man, Gashwin, subsided and softly replied, "Sorry father."

Recognition suddenly seizured through Toph and her eyes snapped open reflexively in shock.

"I recognise the son's voice," Toph said, loud enough for her friends to hear but not the Sandbenders. "He's the one that stole Appa."

"Are you sure?" Katara asked urgently.

There was an anger like iron in Toph's chest, solid, inflexible, hard enough to concuss somebody with. This man, this boy, had stolen Appa away. Appa hadn't wanted to go, he'd struggled and roared but had been no match for the Sandbenders and Toph hadn't been able to stop them.

"I never forget a voice," Toph said, acutely aware of the feel of the rock behind her and its readiness to bend to her will.

Wind snapped across their backs like closing jaws and then Aang was striding forward.

"You stole Appa," he snarled. "Where is he? What did you do to him?"

"They're lying, they're the thieves," Gashwin said wildly.

Aang gave a wordless shout of exertion and a huge roar of wind streaked away from him, slamming into a sandsailer. The sturdy wooden boat shattered beneath it.

The harsh noise of destruction sounded like sweet justice to Toph, and when Aang spoke it was like her own uncompromising anger was given voice.

"Where is my bison?"

Some of the Sandbenders were yelling in shock at the destruction of their sandsailer and others cried out in fear, but none of them answered with anything useful. Toph could almost feel the fury radiating off Aang. It fed her own rage; she wanted to get a hold of the Sandbender who had taken Appa and _force_ him to answer.

The same urge had possessed Aang.

"You tell me where he is _now_!" He commanded. The airbender was sounding less and less like a twelve year old boy and more and more like something else.

Another great blade of air crashed down on a sandsailer.

"What did you do?" The old Sandbender demanded.

"It-it wasn't me!" Gashwin stuttered, sounding exactly like someone who had just realised they were cornered.

Toph remembered the big, friendly presence of Appa, remembered sitting with him as they waited for the others to return from the library. She remembered his happy roars in the past made in response to Aang's chatter as they flew, and then the noises of fear and pain and useless defiance as he fought and was caught and was dragged away.

And now here was this boy, this boy who had done these things, and he was trying to slide out of the spotlight.

She stabbed her finger at Gashwin and impaled him with what she had witnessed.

"You said to put a muzzle on him!"

There was a beat of silence; the last gasp of air before going under.

"You _muzzled_ Appa?" Aang said; his simultaneous disbelief that someone would do this and certainly that Gashwin had was palpable in his enraged voice. The tone of it was so visceral it was like Appa was in front of them, being bound and imprisoned as they spoke, the rope wound tight around his soft muzzle.

Aang exploded. A scream of tortured wind erupted from him and blasted the sandbenders final sailer to splinters. The air was charged and it felt like something was breaking. Toph had stood outside in thunderstorms before with the force of the storm surrounding her, but that was nothing compared to this.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know it belonged to the Avatar!" Gashwin yelled in complete terror.

Aang responded in a terrible voice.

_"TELL ME WHERE APPA IS!"_

That voice was not familiar, that voice could not be Aang's. That voice was seven thousand worlds away from anything purely human. It echoed with the rage and power of every Avatar who had ever lived, and there was no mercy or kindness there. It was like a force of nature.

It was the sound of the Avatar State.

It was the sound of Oblivion.

The Aang Toph knew suddenly seemed like an impossible thing, something she hadn't appreciated that was now gone forever.

Aang was just a kid. She'd smushed his face into a bowl of soup and laughed as he infuriated Sokka on early mornings and herself had yelled at him when he tried to stop an argument between Toph and Katara. She hadn't known him long, but she had known him well. Aang was a flicker of light and the Avatar State was the eclipse, and Toph was skewered by the certainly that from this there could be no returning.

"I traded him to some merchants! He's probably in Ba Sing Sa by now. They were going to sell him there," Gashwin cried, honesty pouring from his mouth as though it might save him. "Please! We'll escort you out of the desert! We'll help however we can!"

The wind was beginning to howl violently around them like nothing Toph had ever experienced before. She had always thought airbending a bit of a weak element. It had its uses, obviously, what with Aang having survived the concentrated efforts of the entire fire nation for this long, but it was inherently evasive. Aang would sooner give ground then hold it and would rather move a rock then break it, and Toph had had to keep reminding herself that this didn't mean he was weak.

She didn't need reminding now though.

The air quaked and was rent around them as great sheets of sand and wood splinters flung themselves at the groups of people. With the ground shifting so freely Toph's feet couldn't see a thing, not even blurry outlines. She was blind and shocked and afraid.

Afraid of _Aang_.

Impossibly, the wind grew even more; the world was shuddering loose around them.

"Just get out of here!" Sokka's yell punched through the storm and a second later his hand hit Toph's shoulder.

"RUN!"

Toph ran even though she couldn't feel where she was going, letting Sokka's fierce grip guide the way. The tone of his voice alone told Toph that whatever was happening was bad, really really bad. Together Toph and Sokka coughed and stumbled through the air that was made up of too little air and too much of everything else, no purposeful direction other than just away from this place, away from Aang. Momo chattered in alarm somewhere above them and the yells of the fleeing sandbenders disappeared into the storm.

But then Toph felt Sokka falter, his hesitation transmitted through his loosening grip.

"Wait," he said, but the word sounded impulsive, not like he was talking to Toph but like a thought had been jerked out of him.

Maybe the sudden doubt Toph had felt through his hand had triggered some rapid subconscious memory, or maybe she had already been about to think it on her own, but before the word was over Toph knew exactly what he meant and was digging her heels into the ground. Sokka stopped beside her.

"Where's Katara?" Toph demanded, raising an arm to cover her face.

Katara, who had led them out of the desert, was now nowhere to be heard.

Wind and grit beat against Toph's arm angrily, viciously, with all of the grief of losing Appa, the only other survivor of an era lost after one hundred years sleeping under the ice. The storm was fuelled by an innocent mistake that could never be forgiven, a hundred years that couldn't ever be taken back and the terrible, gaping maw of an endless future, the future in which every moment of every day, every blink of his eye and beat of his heart, again and again and again Aang was the last one left, the last one there, the last one who would forever and always be getting left behind.

"What's happening?" Toph yelled.

She needed Sokka to be her eyes; he needed to talk to her.

"Katara stayed with him," Sokka replied, words short with stress, the sound of dirt in his mouth. "She's trying to calm him down."

"She'll get torn to shreds!" Toph protested.

For a moment in time the storm yowled around them, the noise of it so loud it vibrated in Toph's ribs.

"No," Sokka said, with sudden, inexplicable certainty, "She won't."

And so they stood in no-man's land, unable to leave and unable to go back, and it struck Toph that whilst it required strength to lead them all out of the desert staying behind now with Aang required something else entirely from Katara.

Their inaction felt unbearable and with every passing moment Toph was sure she was going to do something violent with earthbending. But she didn't. Toph wouldn't realise it until later but it was Sokka's stillness beside her that kept her sane. His sureness and steadiness somehow made the unbearable bearable, which was quite impressive considering he'd been hallucinating giant mushrooms and the like for most of the past twenty-four hours.

Toph felt it coming before it happened. Something changed in the energy in the air and she inhaled sharply, getting sand and splinters up her nose. Then, as though it had reached its peak and blown itself to bits, the wind stopped rising. It blew around them now in enraged, fruitless circles, going nowhere, achieving nothing, and not rising.

Lowering her arm and facing back the way they'd come Toph listened hard for any sound of Katara, but there was just the jagged, broken wind.

It slackened like someone giving up and then finally, like a dying breath, dissipated entirely. The final rush as it all blew away made Toph's fringe scrabble anxiously across her face in an attempt to escape.

It was over.

"Sokka," Toph said.

It wasn't a question, it was a prompt.

"Come on," Sokka muttered and walked forward.

Toph followed him more slowly, feeling her way through the clouded landscape as shapes began to fuzzily appear again beneath her feet.

She could feel Katara and Aang ahead of them, sort of. It was all confusing and Toph was feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable, a feeling she wanted to punch in the face, so she stuck close to Sokka's footprints.

To Toph Katara and Aang felt like a lumpy rock, though she knew it was them. When she got closer and the vibrations became marginally clearer she realized why they had felt this way. The two of them stood with their feet crowded on the same piece of ground and Katara was hugging Aang hard against herself, as though if she could just hold him tight enough she could protect him from himself.

The rawness of it kind of hurt. Toph didn't know what to do with how it made her feel.

She stopped. She was a few meters away from Aang and Katara and abruptly found she could go no further. Sokka had almost reached the pair, who had given no sign that they noticed his approach, but when Toph stopped he noticed and turned around.

For half a moment Toph felt a wordless, overwhelming fear that Sokka would blame her for stopping.

Why was she so afraid?

Was she a coward?

Didn't she care about Aang enough?

Was she a bad friend?

But Sokka just said, "It's okay," in a way that recognized why Toph was afraid and somehow didn't blame her for it, and he came back for her.

Sokka coming back for her abruptly gave her courage. Before he had reached her Toph stepped forward through the unknown and she and Sokka reached the two motionless people together.

Toph imagined she could smell the ozone in the air, like lightning had just struck this place, but she knew it was just that: imagined. Really, the air was just gritty with dust and heat in a way that made her tired.

"Hey Aang," Sokka said gently.

Wordlessly Katara incorporated Sokka into the hug, surrounding Aang with the reminder that he wasn't alone. Toph knew from the stories they had told, sad stories told with sad laughs to make them kinder, that Katara and Sokka had been Aang's lifeline long before Toph had met them. They alone had kept Aang from falling into the hole that was left by the death of his people

They had kept him coming back from every time he stood on the edge.

Saving someone from that didn't come easy though, and empathy had its price. Toph could feel through the wet sand not moving as it should the tears that had fallen from both Aang and Katara's faces.

Just as the knowledge that Appa had been hurt and taken somewhere Aang could not protect him had broken through all of his defences in one cataclysmic blow, Katara was hurting just because of the simple fact that she knew Aang was hurting.

It was a strange and frightening thing and after a lonely upbringing where Toph had been so swaddled in cotton that she couldn't feel the sunlight it seemed like empathy would require some marvellous amount of bravery, and possibly also a hearty dose of recklessness. Most people said that friendship was a gift, but Toph knew it was also a leap into the unknown.

But that didn't stop her from stepping forward.

Toph stood next to Katara, Sokka and Aang and clapped her hands on the two water tribe members backs. She was a bit inexperienced with this so she may have hit them rather harder than a hug necessarily required but it was the thought that counted, and Sokka extricated an arm from between Toph and Aang and threw it around her shoulders to say thank you.

With one arm on Sokka's shoulders and the other pressing Katara's plait against her bag Toph wasn't actually touching Aang, but that didn't matter. He would feel her presence just as she could feel his, and through the sound of his breathing Toph knew the shadow had passed. Aang was Aang again; the war inside him was over.

She had been afraid of him in the Avatar State, but she had been brave for him as well, and somehow Toph knew that this would make it okay.

They would get Appa back, Toph promised herself fiercely. It was not negotiable. She didn't know how and she didn't know when but the details didn't matter. Details were rocks strewn across a path that led to where they wanted to go, and Toph didn't believe it detours. Whatever challenges lay between them and getting Appa back they would smash their way through head on, it was as simple as that.

Toph wanted to rub her knuckles together. She wanted to pace back and forth and rage and talk and plan.

But not just yet.

Their battles would come, but right now they had to put Aang back together and imbue him with the knowledge that even though the airbenders were gone and Appa was missing he wasn't alone. Katara, Sokka and Toph could give him a strength he could hold inside himself like a talisman, or a brand of fire, so that alongside the rest of them Aang could fight his way to where Appa was and at the end of the long journey still be strong enough to break the beloved bison free and bring him safely home.


End file.
